


The Smell of Rain

by vibranium



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, i guess it can be called domestic fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 16:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibranium/pseuds/vibranium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The flight home is delayed for an expected two days of on and off downpours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smell of Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Goose for being the best beta in the world~~~

The flight home is delayed for an expected two days of on and off downpours. They don’t mind, not really, not when they’re somewhere in the middle of England in a gorgeous safe house. They have the entire place to themselves, a discreet little Tudor that must’ve cost SHIELD well over six-hundred-thousand to purchase and detail.

 

Regardless, neither of the agents mind. Not at all. They’ve got this beautiful house in a relatively small area, and there’s so much land attached to the property that they don’t have to worry about a neighbor for a half-mile in each direction.

 

And since they’re alone, they feel safer than they would have if they’d been in a well-populated area, such as the heart of London or a hotel in the center of Berlin as they’d been put so many times before.

 

Since Natasha feels safe, she decides that instead of staying inside, she’ll make sure the veranda awning is sturdy enough to withstand the rain and sit outside for a while. She’d gotten bored before, while Clint was cleaning up his guns and making sure all of his arrows were in perfect order, and she went through the items throughout the house. She found copies of books scattered over shelves, found that they were _real_ , not just cardboard pieces with perfect prints glued to them, and quickly grew interested in many of them. She’d gone through about four already, and had another two lined up. And once she was sure that the awning was secure and stable, she settled herself outside on the padded swinging bench, legs curled up to her chest.

 

She read avidly, taking her time and rereading things she found to be particularly amazing or interesting. Sometime about a quarter of the way through the first large novel Clint comes outside and drapes a shawl over Natasha shoulders, then disappears back inside.

 

Half an hour later he returns with two cups in his hand. He asks, “Can I sit out here with you?” when he sees that she’s gotten to the next chapter and realized that he was standing and holding out a mug to her. She takes the cup, the warmth against her hands very much welcomed, and nods to her partner.

 

She’s still a bit wary about being around him; it’s not that she doesn’t trust him – she’s learned to do so within the first year of their partnership. And now it’s coming up on the fourth month of their second year working side-by-side and she doesn’t know how to really take all the nice things he does for her, small or big. The tea, for instance – she wonders how he knows what’s her favorite and how she takes it. She figures after a bit of mulling over it and reading more with him sitting about half a foot away from her that he’s simply very observant.

 

She finds herself strangely okay with it, him knowing these little details about her.

 

She shifts around a bit, getting herself more comfortable, and sighs quietly, completely contently, around the rim of the mug she holds in her hand. She looks up briefly once she finishes the paragraph she’d been reading, and she gives Clint a small smile and hopes that he knows the small upturning of the corners of her lips is genuine and true.

 

When she gets a smile in return, broad but showing no teeth, the corners of his eyes crinkling, she knows he understands. She suddenly feels grateful to have him here with her, surprised at herself for being so happy that it’s _him_ and not some other agent that she’s never really worked with. And what she’s really glad for is the fact that she signed the contract to be working with him as often as possible.

 

■■■

 

Later on, once Natasha is beginning the second novel, the other now in Clint’s hands, where he’s looking at it curiously, he asks, “Why wouldn’t you rather stay inside and read?” She looks up when he asks, lowering the novel to her lap, and her eyes flicker quickly, almost imperceptibly, to her legs and feet in his lap, to their emptied mugs on the coffee table in front of them, and the small movements of the swing that he’s making happen, then back to him, to his eyes.

 

She smiles when she gets there, a tiny little twitch of her lips, and shrugs a bit. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s that when I was in the Room, my friends and I, we would sneak out whenever it rained. It was such a rare occurrence in Russia. It was always snowing. But when it rained, we’d get outside and run around.” She shrugs again and gives him a dreamy kind of smile, though it’s ghostly and a little sad, contorting her expressions, drawing her eyebrows together a bit. “We didn’t care about the consequences much. They’d make us run while they whipped out legs and backs. But we didn’t really care much.”

 

Then, she adds, the expression from just seconds before dropping from her features, “And I like the smell for some reason.” Somehow, to Clint, this little confession feels much more personal than the previous had. Regardless, he listens through and nods a little bit, as if he understands. He does, in some aspects, understand the first, but he can only truly say that he knows the feeling when it comes to the second.

 

So he says to her, a little confession of his own, “The smell of rain reminds me of when we first met.”

 

In response, he gets a broad smile, all crinkling eyes and upward-curved lips. And he thinks that the tightness in his chest is the best feeling in the world.

 

■■■

 

That night, she asks him to push the two beds together, which he does a little too eagerly and tries not to show it. She stays on the bed she had taken earlier that day, when they crashed and slept like the dead when they’d arrived just past midnight.

 

She does, though, hunker down after finishing that second larger-than-life novel that she’d been working on out on the veranda and replacing it in its rightful place on the shelf again. A few minutes later, he asks why she asked him to put the beds together, and in answer, she wriggles herself closer. He’s surprised, not only that she wants to physical contact (something he’s learned to keep to a minimum), but the fact that she trusts him enough to hold her in her sleep.

 

Once he gets over the shock, his arms wrap around her, careful and gentle and not pushing it (he hopes). She rests her head on his chest. He finds, when he looks down, her eyes are already shut and he tentatively presses his lips to the top of her head and tries to be discreet when he breathes in.

 

She smells like rain and he falls asleep with his face pressed into her hair.


End file.
